Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Anyone who has tried it will attest that Logic is an extremely deep program. So deep, in fact, that you may only ever use a fraction of the features it offers. That's fine. No use in making your life more complicated than it needs to be. The down side is, there are a lot of neat features that get overlooked or forgotten. A good example of this is the Q-FLAM parameter under the ADVANCED QUANTIZATION options of the QUANTIZE section.

Q-FLAM simply staggers the notes in a chord you play by the selected note amount. While this can indeed be used to simulate flams with drum sounds, it also happens to be perfect for emulating the strum of a guitar. Eventually, with longer note values, you'll get an arpeggio instead of a strum, so try to keep values somewhere between 24th notes up to 64ths for best results. And remember - for best results, you need to voice your chords like they'd be voiced on a guitar for best results. Give it a try!

midiStrum is a very configurable VST (for PC, Mac & Linux) that "Sequentially delays notes of an input chord to simulate strumming." It's part of the Piz MIDI plugins bundle free at the www.thepiz.org. I just tried it now for the first time -- it works!